By Shane Gehlert
HAVE you ever wondered just how clever a chicken, savvy a sheep, cognitive a cow or gifted a goat is? Or perhaps that bacon you so relish was once a perceptive, prodigious pig, flouting its mental prowess amongst its peers, philosophising Plato and poring over poetry. The answers may surprise you!
In his book “Oh My Goat!” Author Shane Gehlert takes a deep dive into the psychology of animals, how we have treated, tested, measured, and mass-produced them.
Peppered with unusual stores and weird and wonderful factoids, you can expect to learn: Cows have excellent long-term memory and strong social groups, maintained by licking; chickens show emotions by ‘blushing’, and a chook named Mike once lived for 18 months without a head!
Goats recognise each other’s mugs and human faces; sheep have ‘besties’ and choose friends of a similar age and gender, much as we do; pigs whose tails curl to the right are bold and sociable, whereas left-tailed pigs are introverted and, unbelievably, more people die from pig attacks than from sharks!
Despite the clear signs of animal intelligence, we breed, raise, kill, and consume so many livestock that the world is awash with chooks and cows, with only 4% of the earth’s biomass consisting of wild animals.
Livestock farming also accounts for 12% of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than the combined emissions from all the world’s planes and ships, which ultimately poses the question: perhaps we should put less pork on our fork, not more!
Shane Gehlert: “Oh My Goat!” Just how intelligent are the animals we eat? is available now in paperback or eBook through Amazon.
